#SMCChicago Recap – February 2016

Scott @ 1871

It’s been a few years since I’ve dropped into our local Social Media Club meetings and I have to say I was glad to be back.  Saw a few familiar faces last night and met a handful of some really high-quality social pros.  The event was held at 1871, a startup coworking space that is an awesome mecca for entrepreneurship and ideas. Love this place, wish I could spend more time here helping startups grow!

This month’s presenter was Jeff Ernst of a social WOM startup named Smync.   Jeff himself is no marketing startup, I had to smirk when he mentioned a few times that he’s not new to this “marketing” thing.  Really intelligent guy, sparked some great ideas and really grateful for people like Jeff are willing to share and collaborate.

Here’s some of my mental notes and ideas sparked from Jeff’s engaging talk.

• Advocate portals are not going to get people to share, it’s the brand loyalty and the level that users are actually advocates and care about your brand.

Audience size is not your metric, connection to your brand is… @gosmync #smcchicago

— Scott Winterroth (@swinterroth) February 12, 2016

• PR teams are going to continue to have to dig deeper as more and more metrics are coming online.  Be prepared or be left behind.
• At what point does a particular piece of content have an ROI value?  This blog post is worth XX in return…

Social word of mouth leads to 8-24x more social shares @smcchicago #smcchicago

— elizabeth ryder (@lizzieryder) February 12, 2016

• How do you strengthen your brand enough to not need to hire social influencers.  Jeff has a really interesting metric that he dropped, most consumers are actually more loyal to brands than social influencers.  Which I believe.

https://twitter.com/leyla_a/status/697944834259050496

• Paid social impressions are like a boat, it’s a hole in water you keep throwing money into. WOM is much stronger and sort of like organic search vs. ppc.
• Word of Mouth Marketing is a strategy that takes time, don’t expect results by the end of the month.

Recommendations from trusted sources is involved in 77% of all first time purchases. #interesting #smcchicago

— Shelly (@shellyBmedia) February 12, 2016

Jeff also listed a great series of steps to engage Social Word of Mouth marketing.  You can find the overview slide of his presentation in the gallery below. Thanks to the SMCChicago team!